Two Stories from The Golestan of Saʿdi on the advantages of silence

Translated by Sir Edwin Arnold, [1899]

I said to a friend that I have chosen rather to be silent than to speak because on most occasions good and bad words are scattered concurrently but enemies perceive only the latter. He replied: ‘That enemy is the greatest who does not see any good.’

The brother of enmity passes not near a good man

Except to consider him as a most wicked liar.

Virtue is to the eyes of enmity the greatest fault.

Saʿdi is a rose but to the eye of enemies a thorn.

The world illumining sun and fountain of light

Look ugly to the eye of the mole.

A scholar of note had a controversy with an unbeliever but, being

unable to cope with him in argument, shook his head and retired.

Someone asked him how it came to pass that, with all his eloquence and

learning, he had been unable to vanquish an irreligious man. He replied: “My learning is in the Qur’an, in tradition and in the sayings of sheikhs, which he neither believes in nor listens to. Then of what use is it to me to hear him blaspheming?”

To him of whom thou canst not rid thyself by the Qur’an and tradition

The best reply is if thou dost not reply anything.

Tomb of Saʿdi Shirazi; Persian Poet and Prose Writer